This chapter from Dallas Willard’s book, Renewing the Christian Mind, stood out to me because it wasn’t written in 2016 or 2020 or 2024. It was around 2009 when Dallas wrote that article.

Even 15 years ago, he had this question:

For all those years of evangelicals being courted in politics … why has there not been any any measurable improvement in the ethical quality of American political discourse and practice? 

What he didn’t ask was, “Why hasn’t there been any movement on abortion?” or “Why hasn’t there been any movement on the national debt?”

He asked about ethical quality because that’s what Christians should bring to any arena where they are working. Yet, the ethical quality had not improved. Certainly in the last 15 years we not seen improvement, but marked erosion of the quality of our politics, with evangelicals in the thick of this mess.

The loss of integrity is the core of Dallas’s argument. Evangelicals had truncated the gospel to “get saved so you can go to heaven,” which then led them away from character development. The impact of the gospel after the Civil War was markedly different than the impact before the end of the Civil War. The impact of the gospel led to abolition movement. It led to other areas as well. Education. Economics. Caring for the poor. Medical care. Christians thought in terms of the gospel impacting the now and not just “the sweet by and by.” In other words, character mattered. Deep transformation in the life of the believer led to meaningful work in the real world.

The basic meaning of discipleship for Dallas was this:

A disciple is someone who is with Jesus learning to be like him. 

If I’m a disciple of Jesus, I’m learning from him how to lead my life in the kingdom of God as he would lead my life in the kingdom of God if he were I.

Instead, we divorce our practice from our belief, and it shows up magnified in how politics is handled these days.

The chapter is worth reading because Dallas lays out the case for the disappearance of moral knowledge and its effects far better than I could try in a blog post. But the result is clear:

We are rewarding people only for technical competence. We lose our devotion to public good. We want to education for technical competence. Anything else is useless, in our current climate. We think the market sorts out who is good and who is bad. 

If we think the “market” sorts out who is good and bad, or wealth is equivalent to knowledge or that wealth gives that person the gravitas needed to solve world hunger or space travel, then we’ve truly lost sight of the content of moral knowledge. Sure, the culture surrendered that base of moral knowledge long ago, but Dallas’s contention is this: the church in America surrendered its place as the base of moral knowledge as well.

And we are lesser for it. No matter how big our bank accounts may be.